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Forgotten fields horses3/31/2023 ![]() I discovered the 4-year-old Harley Dude, or “HD,” who never made it to the track but keeps up just fine in the hunt field. He changes his lead in the corner before she knows what lead she’s on, and his attitude is always, “What’s next?” He goes down to every jump with his ears up, no matter what distance his kid found-or didn’t-to the last one. I discovered the teenage schoolmaster that cost less than I used to spend on my weekly show bill. I needed horses that could keep up with my new hobby, but they needed to be inexpensive, untrained, and yet versatile enough to eventually sell to amateurs who wanted to hunt and show and hunter pace and trail ride. My clients needed horses that they could take care of themselves, that needed no program, no prep, no drugs and no maintenance. My best friend said something along the lines of: “You show horse people can’t ride. I amassed a group of great clients, all with families and “real jobs” and horse budgets that had limits. I took a step back, and I think several steps forward. But does anyone really feel like getting horses and amateurs to the ring has actually gotten easier? Does anyone think the level of quality, on average, class to class, is increasing? How long is the fame of today’s superstars, and do you remember them better than the ones you ran to the ring to watch when people still got excited about going to the ring to watch? We weren’t using those skills, so we pretty much forgot the conformation division altogether.Įveryone said the warmblood was scopier and easier and more trainable and fancier. We forgot how to ride them, how to pick them out by their bloodlines and their conformation. We forgot our hero horses that we grew up dying to ride. With the influx of warmbloods, we forgot. This country’s traditions weren’t keeping up with the market’s demands. ![]() ![]() And then watched everyone run off to Europe and bring back the next generation of warmbloods. I learned to make young horses on these new homebreds, and I thought I had a pretty good idea of what I was doing. Somehow the industry and my career shifted, and we bred warmbloods instead of the Thoroughbreds we’d been breeding since the mid-50s. Ironically, Rox Dene got her revenge on Virginia it’s likely in no small way due to her huge success, being a warmblood, that a top Thoroughbred show hunter can now rarely be found even here, in the rings of Upperville and Keswick where they used to reign. My mother got a nice deal on a mare that had to travel several states away from where she was foaled to be sold, because no one at the time in Virginia-land of the traditional show hunter-would even go look at a horse that wasn’t a Thoroughbred. I also had a huge crush on a lovely junior hunter that was way out of my price range, and I loved to go to the ring to watch Gem Twist do amazing things. Two decades ago, I had a pair of top junior jumpers. ![]()
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